Cultivating aesthetics - iSites

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The Aesthetics of Organization
Miles Davis found a provocative way to disrupt secure habitual ways of responding
in hopes of awakening fresh responses and exploring the edge of one’s capacity. In
a famous 1959 recording session, the musicians arrived in the studio and were
presented with sketches of songs - some only partially complete - written in
unconventional modal forms. One song, ‘Blue in Green’, contained only 10 bars
instead of the more familiar 8 or 12 bar form that characterized American popular
music. Never having seen this music before, and unfamiliar with these odd forms,
the musicians had no rehearsal. The album that resulted - Kind of Blue - consists
entirely of ‘first takes’ so that what we hear when listening to this music is these
musicians discovering the new music at the very moment they are inventing it.
Miles Davis nurtured an aesthetic of surprise: he introduced incremental disruption
that handicapped routines and made it impossible for the players to rely on rote
learning and habitual responses (see Barrett, 1998). Listen to pianist Bill Evans
describe this famous session in the original liner notes:
There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must
paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such
a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the
parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a
particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with
their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. The resulting
pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said
that those who see will find something captured that escapes explanation. This
conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflection, I believe, has prompted
the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or
improvising musician.
This passage poetically articulates the aesthetic of surrender, the deliberate
attempt to suspend deliberation, embracing the ‘direct deed’ in the hopes of
catching the glimpse of fleeting, transient relations. By taking familiar structures
away, musicians are hoping to notice the mobile, flowing configurations, the
fragments and dispersed collages that are seeds for potential exploration and
development.
In sum, musicians employ deliberate, conscious attention in their practice, but at
the moment when they are called upon to play, this conscious striving becomes an
obstacle. Too much regulation and control restricts the emergence of fresh ideas.
Musicians must surrender their conscious striving. They prepare to be spontaneous
by practicing, mastering, and then letting go: by deliberately facing unfamiliar
challenges, by developing provocative learning relationships, by creating
incremental disruptions that demand experimentation and risk. As saxophonist Ken
Peplowski said: